On December 22, at the
stroke of midnight, Renita Pitts became a single woman. Renita is 44 years old,
a mother of five with 14 grandchildren. She has been on and off of welfare for
most of her life. After she had her fifth child, her husband brought crack
cocaine into their house, telling her that it would help her lose weight. She
became addicted and struggled for 13 years with that addiction. Throughout her
marriage, Renita says, she was afraid to leave her house. "I couldn't
trust my husband with our children long enough to go to school. If I left for
even an hour, he would have a full-fledged party going on when I came back,"
she says. In addition to being a drug addict, Renita's husband was
verbally, emotionally, and physically abusive. She says they fought frequently,
and she had to call the police again and again.

Renita and her husband
separated shortly after she stopped using drugs and returned to college. She
had also begun attending church. According to Renita, her husband "was insecure
because of my security." He gave her an ultimatum, saying she must leave school
and stop going to church. When she refused, he left.

Despite the abuse and the
drugs, Renita says, she felt many social pressures to stay married. Regardless,
she says, "it was important not to have him in my life, constantly pumping me
full of drugs." She says the relationship had become so abusive that if she had
stayed in it any longer, "someone would have ended up dead."

With the help of
California's welfare program, Renita is currently enrolled in the African
American Studies and Social Welfare departments at the University of California
at Berkeley and works on social justice issues at the Women of Color Resource
Center. She was happy to see her divorce finalized in December.

The life stories of Renita
and many other women like her are not on the radar screen in Washington,
however. Legislation that would promote marriage among low-income people is
currently wending its way through Congress. The so-called "Healthy Marriage
Initiative" includes a range of provisions designed to encourage women on
welfare to get and stay married: providing extra cash bonuses to recipients who
get married, deducting money from welfare checks when mothers are living with
men who are not the fathers of their children, increasing monthly welfare
checks for married couples, offering marriage and relationship education
classes, and putting up billboards in low-income communities promoting the
value of marriage. Several provisions specifically target Latino and
African-American communities. So-called marriage promotion policies, such as
those in the Healthy Marriage Initiative, have been touted by the Bush
administration and enjoy wide bipartisan support in Washington. Many advocates,
however, are concerned that, if the bill passes, it would become more difficult
for Renita and domestic violence survivors like her to get a divorce and to
survive without a husband.

Married Good, Single Bad

The administration's
point man for marriage promotion is Dr. Wade Horn, assistant secretary of
Health and Human Services, whose Administration for Children and Families would
run the initiative. In July 2002 Horn wrote, "On average, children raised by
their own parents in healthy and stable married families enjoy better physical
and mental health and are less likely to be poor. They're more successful
in school, have lower dropout rates, and fewer teenage pregnancies. Adults,
too, benefit from healthy and stable marriages." Critics say Horn sees the
wedded state as a cure-all for society's ills, while ignoring the
difficulties of promoting something as intensely personal as marriage. Horn and
others in the ACF refused repeated requests for comment.

Marriage promotion
legislation has its roots in the 1996 welfare reform act. This legislation
ended welfare as an entitlement--it allowed states to deny assistance to
fully qualified applicants, and resulted in the abrogation of some
applicants' constitutional rights. It also created a five-year lifetime
limit for welfare recipients, denied aid to many immigrant communities, created
cumbersome financial reporting requirements for welfare recipients, and set up
work rules that, according to many recipients, emphasize work hours over
meaningful employment opportunities and skill development. The legislation
explicitly claimed promoting marriage as one of its aims.

When welfare reform was
passed, Congress required that it be revisited in five years. The Healthy
Marriage Initiative that Congress is considering today was introduced in 2002
as part of the welfare reform reauthorization package. Welfare--now known
as Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF)--was set to be reauthorized that
year, but that reauthorization is now two years overdue.

In September, Senators Rick
Santorum (R-Pa.) and Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) introduced a bill to reauthorize
welfare for six months without overall changes, but with $800 million for
marriage promotion and fatherhood programs over a two-year period. Sen.
Santorum has been a strong proponent of marriage promotion. In an October 2003
speech to the Heritage Foundation, he promised to aggressively press for
legislation that supported marriage between one man and one woman. "The
government must promote marriage as a fundamental societal benefit. Both
for its intrinsic good and for its benefits for society, we need marriage. And
just as important, we need public leaders to communicate to the American public
why it is necessary." The reauthorization bill has died in the Senate, but
because of its strong bipartisan support, it is likely to be re-introduced.
Sen. Santorum refused repeated requests for comment for this story.

Diverting Dollars

Although the debate about
marriage promotion has focused on the Healthy Marriage Initiative, this is just
one piece of the Bush administration's pro-marriage agenda. The Department
of Health and Human Services has already diverted over $100 million within
existing programs into marriage promotion. These are programs that have no
specific legislative authority to promote marriage. Some examples: $6.1 million
has been diverted from the Child Support Enforcement Program, $9 million from
the Refugee Resettlement Program, $14 million from the Child Welfare Program,
and $40 million from the Social and Economic Development Strategies Program
focusing on Native Americans, among others. Plus, another nearly $80 million
has been awarded to research groups studying marriage.

One beneficiary is in Grand
Rapids, Michigan. Healthy Marriages Grand Rapids received $990,000 from the
federal government in 2003 to "facilitate the understanding that healthy
marriages between parents is [sic] critical to the financial well-being of
children, increase effective co-parenting skills of married and non-married
parents to improve relationships between low-income adults who parent children,
increase active, healthy participation of non-custodial fathers in the lives of
their children, increase the number of prepared marriages among low-income
adults, and decrease the divorce rate among low-income adults." The program
coordinates local public media campaigns plugging marriage as well as
relationship counseling classes, many offered by faith-based
providers.

It is precisely this
emphasis on marriage as a cure for economic woes that worries many welfare
recipients and advocates. According to Liz Accles at the Welfare Made a
Difference National Campaign, "Marriage promotion is problematic for many
reasons. It is discriminatory. It values certain families over others. It
intrudes on privacy rights. The coercive nature of this is lost on a lot of
people because they don't realize how deeply in poverty people are
living." Accles says that adequate educational opportunities, subsidized child
care, and real job skills and opportunities are the answer to the financial
concerns of women on welfare. She joins many domestic violence counselors in
saying that marriage education funded by government coffers and administered
via faith-based providers and welfare case workers is at best a waste of
taxpayer money, and at worst pushes women deeper into abusive relationships
that may end in injury or death.

In Allentown, Pa., a
program called the Family Formation and Development Project offers a 12-week
marriage education course for low-income, unmarried couples with children.
Employment services are offered as part of the program, but only to fathers. In
its application for federal funding, the program set a goal of 90% of the
participating fathers finding employment. No such goal was set for the mothers.
According to Jennifer Brown, legal director at the women's legal rights
organization Legal Momentum, which filed a complaint with the Department of
Health and Human Services, "What we fear is that this kind of sex stereotyped
programming--jobs for fathers, not for mothers--will be part of
marriage promotion programs funded by the government."

Experts at Legal Momentum
are concerned that the administration is diverting scarce funds from proven and
effective anti-poverty programs and funneling the money into untested
marriage-promotion programs. They say there is little information about what is
happening on the ground, making it difficult to determine what activities have
been implemented.

Feminist economists point
out that the mid-1990s welfare reform law served larger economic interests by
moving women out of the home and into the work force at a time when the economy
was booming and there was a need for low-paid service workers. Now that the
economy is in a recession, the government has adopted a more aggressive policy
of marriage promotion, to pull women out of the work force and back into the
home. According to Avis Jones-DeWeever, Poverty and Welfare Study director at
the Institute for Women's Policy Research, "We are talking about putting
$1.5 billion into telling women to find their knight in shining armor and then
everything will be okay."

Jones-DeWeever says the
view that marriage creates more economically stable individuals is not grounded
in reality. She notes that individuals are likely to marry within their own
socioeconomic group, so low-income women are likely to marry low-income men.
According to author Barbara Ehrenreich's estimates, low-income women would
need to have roughly 2.3 husbands apiece in order to lift them out of poverty.
Jones-DeWeever points out that in African-American communities, there are
simply not enough men to marry: there are approximately two and a half women
for every African-American man who is employed and not in jail. In addition,
many social policy analysts are quick to point out that in general, poor people
are not poor because they're unmarried. Rather, they may be unmarried
because they're poor: the socioeconomic conditions in low-income
communities contribute to a climate in which healthy marriages are difficult to
sustain.

Another criticism of
marriage promotion comes from survivors of domestic violence and their
advocates. Studies consistently show that between 50% and 60%--in some
studies up to 80%--of women on welfare have suffered some form of domestic
violence, compared to 22% of the general population. In addition, between 3.3
and 10 million children witness domestic violence each year. Domestic violence
survivors say their abuse was often a barrier to work, and many have reported
being harassed or abused while at work. Most survivors needed welfare to escape
the relationship and the violence. Any policy that provides incentives for
women to become and stay married is in effect coercing poor women into
marriage. Many women on welfare, like Renita Pitts, say that their marriages,
rather than helping them out of poverty, set up overwhelming barriers to
building their own autonomous and productive lives.

According to Kaaryn
Gustafson, associate professor of law at the University of Connecticut,
policies that attempt to look out for women's safety by restricting or
coercing their activities are paternalistic and misguided. "The patriarchal
model is really troubling. The gist is that if there isn't a man in the
house there isn't a family. The studies of family well-being are all very
problematic because you cannot parse out the issues of education, socioeconomic
status, and other emotional and psychological issues that are tied up in who
gets married and who doesn't."

Reproductive Straitjacket

While marriage promotion as
a federal policy began in 1996, many say it is only one part of a much larger
system of control over, and sanction of, the sexual and reproductive freedoms
of poor women and women of color. Another part of this system is child
exclusion legislation, which has been adopted by 21 states. Child exclusion
laws permit states to pay benefits for only one child born to a woman on
welfare. Social policy experts say it is a response to the myth that
African-American welfare recipients were having more children in order to get
larger benefit checks. Such laws push women either deeper into poverty, or into
abortions. In some states, a woman who chooses to have another child instead of
an abortion may end up trying to raise two or more children on less than $300 a
month.

Christie, who would like to
use only her first name, is a single mother of two. She has been working,
supporting her children and herself, and going to college. Since her first
child was born, she has also been receiving welfare. While on welfare, she
fought to get a college degree in general education; now she hopes to get a job
as a Spanish language translator. During her time in college, her welfare
caseworker told Christie to quit going to school and instead report to a
welfare-to-work program. She says, "I felt that it was a punishment. Just
because I was on welfare, they could make me quit school and come and sit in a
room and listen to people talking about the jobs I should get. Most of the jobs
that they wanted you to have were geared towards the lower poverty level where
you stay in poverty and you can never climb the socioeconomic ladder. It's
like that's your position and that's where you have to
stay."

When Christie became
pregnant with her second child, her caseworker told her she could not receive
an increase in her benefit. This forced Christie into some tough choices. "My
religion kept me from having an abortion. I worked after I had my daughter,
because I felt like it was a mistake that I made, and so I tried to do what I
could for my daughter." Christie says this legislation penalizes women for
having children, and creates an overwhelming sense of guilt that permeates
low-income families. Rather than celebrating the birth of her daughter,
Christie felt that she needed to work twice as hard to make up for her
"mistake."

When states began adopting
child exclusion policies in the early 1990s, they were implemented under
federal scrutiny. States were required to keep data about the financial status
of affected families. These data showed that child exclusion policies resulted
in women and children being thrust further into poverty. One of the more
sinister effects of the 1996 welfare reform law is that it did away with the
requirement that states monitor the outcome of child exclusion policies. Since
1996, states have been able to impose sanctions on families without paying any
attention to the results.

According to a July 2002
report by the Children's Sentinel Nutrition Assessment Program (C-SNAP), a
research and advocacy collaborative, child exclusion policies are directly
correlated to a number of risks to the health and well-being of children.
Infants and toddlers in families that have been sanctioned under the child
exclusion provisions are 30% more likely to have been hospitalized than
children from families who have not been sanctioned, and these children are 90%
more likely to require hospitalization at the time of an emergency room visit.
In addition, child exclusion sanctions lead to food insecurity rates that are
at least 50% higher than those of families who have not faced sanction. The
negative health and welfare impacts reported in the C-SNAP study increase
dramatically with each year that a family experiences sanctions.

Proponents of child
exclusion legislation, including many members of the Bush administration and a
bipartisan array of senators and representatives, claim that women on welfare
have no business bringing a new child into the world whom they cannot support
financially.

The United Sates has a long
history of regulation of poor women's reproductive activities. From the
forced sterilizations performed in low-income communities of color in the
1940s, 1950s, and even later, to state child services departments appropriating
poor Native American children and giving them to upper-class white foster
parents, many U.S. historians say that sexuality among lower-income communities
of color has traditionally been viewed as something that should be controlled.
The University of Connecticut's Gustafson responds, "There is this idea
that if you pay taxes you have the right to control those who don't, and
it smacks of slavery. There should be some scope of liberty that should be
unconditional, and that especially includes sexuality and family formation."

There's no such
respect for freedom and privacy under TANF. The program requires women to
submit to a barrage of invasive questions and policies; TANF applicants must
provide private details about every aspect of their lives. In California, for
example, the application asks for the names of up to 12 men with whom a woman
has had sexual relations on or around the time of her pregnancy. In San Diego
county, before a woman can receive a welfare check, she must submit to a
"surprise" visit by welfare case workers to verify that there isn't an
unreported man in the household, among other things.

One of the problems with
all of these sexual and reproductive-based policy initiatives is that,
according to Gustafson, they distract people from the actual issues of poverty.
While TANF accounts for less than 2% of the federal budget, the hysteria
surrounding whether and how to assist poor families with children has created
an uproar about whether low-income women should even be allowed to have
children.

Because the 1996 welfare
reform law eliminated the concept of welfare as an entitlement, welfare
recipients lack certain protections other U.S. citizens have under the
Constitution. In effect, when you apply for welfare you are signing away many
of your constitutional rights. For this reason, many advocates today are
critiquing welfare through the lens of human rights rather than constitutional
rights. International human-rights agreements, including the United Nations
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women,
afford women many universal human rights. "Those include access to education,
access to reproductive choice, rights when it comes to marrying or not
marrying," says Gustafson. "When you look at the international statements of
human rights, it provides this context, this lens that magnifies how unjust the
welfare laws are in the United States. The welfare system is undermining
women's political, economic, and social participation in society at
large."

On September 30, Congress
passed another extension of the 1996 welfare legislation. This extension
contained no policy changes--for now. When Congress does finally
reauthorize welfare, child exclusion policies and marriage promotion are likely
to be hot-button issues that galvanize the debate. According to Liz Accles at
the National Welfare Made a Difference Campaign, there are three steps to a
successful welfare strategy. "Access. Adequacy. Opportunity. All three of these
hold equal weight. You cannot have benefits so low that people live deeply in
poverty. You can't have good benefits that only a few people get access
to. You also need to have opportunity for economic mobility built
in."

Although the marriage
promotion bill was defeated this time, it continues to enjoy strong bipartisan
support--including support from the White House now that George W. Bush has
a second term. Welfare recipients and social policy experts are worried that
whenever welfare reform is debated, politicians will deem regulating the
reproductive activities of poor women to be more important than funding proven
anti-poverty measures like education and meaningful job
opportunities.

Sarah Olson is a
contributing reporter for Free Speech Radio News and the National Radio
Project's "Making Contact." She is also a mentor and journalist at the
Welfare Radio Collaborative.

RESOURCES Joan
Meisel, Daniel Chandler, and Beth Menees Rienzi, "Domestic Violence Prevalence
and Effects on Employment in Two California TANF Populations," (California
Institute of Mental Health, 2003); Richard Tolman and Jody Raphael, "A Review
of the Research on Welfare and Domestic Violence," Journal of Social Issues,
2000; Sharmila Lawrence, "Domestic Violence and Welfare Policy: Research
Findings That Can Inform Policies on Marriage and Child Well-Being: Issue
Brief," (Research Forum on Children, Families, and the New Federalism, National
Center for Children in Poverty, 2002); E. Lyon, "Welfare, Poverty and Abused
Women: New Research and Its Implications," Policy and Practice Paper #10,
Building Comprehensive Solutions to Domestic Violence, (National Resource
Center on Domestic Violence, 2000).